What did that bastard know?

I spotted Smith across the crowded airport lobby. I didn't have much trouble reaching him as he stepped on the escalator, though a couple people who hadn't gotten out of my way didn't like my methods. I didn't care. They were all my ancestors, but I'd had it with ancestors. I'd spent my life trying to make a future for them, and look where it had got me.

We had worked hard on this moment, Sherman and I.

(This was after, long after, he threw water on my face or pinched my earlobe or slapped me or whatever he did to bring me around. My memories of that period are rather vague and I'd just as soon not discuss them, thank you. My memories of the hours following that, when Sherman and I had discussed the kid, are clear as can be, and I'd just as soon not discuss them either. I'm supposed to tell everything, but there are limits.) "Meet cute," Sherman had said.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It's a term popular in various eras of twentieth-century Hollywood, describing devices whose purpose is to effect the first plot element of the favorite story of the time, which began 'boy meets girl.'"

"'Boy loses girl, boy gets girl,' right?"

"Right. We needn't concern ourselves too much with the second part. He'll lose you without our help, in the natural order of things, and of course he can't get you in the end."

"Whatever happened to happy endings?" I asked "Don't answer. They died out about the time I was born. So give me an example of meeting cute."

"Veronica Lake as a disillusioned woman on her way out of Hollywood, who spends her last dollar on ham and eggs for Joel McRae, who turns out to be a famous director dressed as a bum to gather material for a movie he plans to make. Sullivan's Travels, Preston Sturges, 1942."

"You've been watching a lot of movies," I said.

"About as many as you. Of course, my data-dumping capacity is larger, and I have better access to it."

"You were thinking along these lines when you told me to dump the coffee in his lap."

"Yes. Now he knows you. We must give him an opportunity to know you better."

"So what's your idea?"

Sherman told me, and here I was, getting onto an escalator in Oakland.

I reached into my purse just about the time Smith saw me. smiled at him, and pressed a button in the purse, and the escalator ground to a stop.

"We do keep running into each other, don't we?" I said.

I hadn't counted on him being so shy. I had to drag a dinner invitation out of him. I was beginning to wonder if the fancy skinsuit I was wearing was really all it was cracked up to be.

Thinking it over, I suppose I'd been expecting him to know his lines as well as I did. I just assumed he was feeling the puppet master's strings pulling him as strongly as they were pulling me. But why should he? If anything, I was his puppet master, and he had no way of knowing that. I was the one who'd seen the scriptor at least the proposal for the way the evening should proceed.

Since he didn't suggest driving I assumed he didn't have a car. So I steered him toward the parking lot, where we'd prepared a contingency plan. That's when I almost got into trouble.

As I said, data-dumping can fill me with facts, but it's not much help at pattern recognition. There were a million vehicles in the lot and I didn't know much about any of them. Oh, I knew the brand names; other than that, I had to go by instinct in selecting "my" automobile.

Logically, I thought I should choose a small one to go with my presumed socio-economic status. But sometimes logic doesn't help. How was I to know that big cars don't always cost more, nor small ones less.

The one I picked was low and uncomfortable looking. As soon as I indicated it I knew I was wrong. Smith looked at me strangely. Well, it was too late to change my mind. I reached in my purse and all the door locks sprang open before he could get dose enough to see it happening. Then we got in and I scanned the controls. They seemed simple and straightforward, though I thought radar might have been helpful. I inserted a key in the ignition. It felt out the proper combination, started the car for me, and I got it in motion.

It was even easier than I'd thought. The vehicle was much faster than anything else on the road. I used the reserve speed to hurry through the smaller autos, keeping the tachometer as close as possible to the red line. I followed the signs to Jack London Square.

I shouldn't have admitted I spoke French. By the time I realized it was out of character to do so, I'd already been speaking it to the waiter.

The food was pretty bad. I'm sure everyone else enjoyed it, but to me, it was tasteless, like chewing cardboard. We require quite different chemicals in our diets than 20ths, including a lot of things that would surely kill Bill Smith, or at least make him very sick. I'd come prepared. I had some capsules that contained all the poisons a self-respecting creature from the ninety-ninth century could ever need. I kept palming them all night and dropping them into my drinks. They had the added advantage of neutralizing the ethanol. I pecked at my food; it was the double scotches that sustained me.

He told me a lot of things I already knew; after all, Bill Smith had become the most extensively researched person in the twentieth century. We had scanned him from his birth (by Caesarean section) to his death.

I'd entered the twentieth century with a good deal of contempt for Mister Smith. Looking at his life from the outside, you just had to wonder why a guy who had so much going for him had done so little with it. He struck me as a whiner, soon to be a wino. He had a responsible position and he was in the process of throwing it away. He'd been a failure at marriage.

He was living in the era that, from my perspective, was about as dose to heaven on Earth as the human race had ever come, and in a nation that had more wealth -- however you want to measure it -- than any other nation ever achieved. From here on up it was going to be down hill all the way, until the human race reached its nadir: those good old days of the far future I called home.

It was only natural I'd find myself thinking what the hell did he have to complain about? Yet the twentieth century was bursting with complainers. They worried about meaningful relationships. They complained about the high cost of living. They had a whole battery of words to describe the things that afflicted them: words like angst, ennui, malaise. They took pills to cure something called depression. They went to classes to learn how to feel good about themselves. They aborted about one out of four of their children. They really felt they had problems.

And at the same time they were busy as beavers destroying the world. They built eventually over three hundred gigatons of nuclear weapons and then pretended they'd never use them. They set in motion the processes that would eventually kill all animal species but themselves and a few insects and a million quickmutating microbes, and that would leave their descendants such as myself catastrophically evolving toward oblivion. They were doing things right then that would change me so much that I could no longer breathe their air or eat their food for any length of time.

I guess it's no wonder they invented existential despair.

Still, it's one thing to see a man's life in overview, and another to hear him tell it. I'd been prepared for the tale, had expected to do my best to smile all the way through it.

But when he started to talk, I found things shifting around. The poor guy, I'd think, and then catch myself thinking it.

He didn't whine. He didn't even really complain. I found myself wishing he would; it would be so much easier to feel a healthy contempt for him. But what he told me was the simple truth. He was lonely. He didn't know what to do about it. He used to be able to lose himself in his job, but that didn't work anymore. He knew it was silly, he couldn't figure out why nothing seemed to mean anything. Working as his own physician, he had prescribed ethanol as a possible cure. It seemed to work some of the time, but the results weren't all in yet. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that he'd reached for something, missed it, and was on his way down. It wouldn't get any better.